diff --git a/core/src/main/java/org/apache/spark/shuffle/sort/BypassMergeSortShuffleWriter.java b/core/src/main/java/org/apache/spark/shuffle/sort/BypassMergeSortShuffleWriter.java
index a1a1fb01426a0..f379a5fb93018 100644
--- a/core/src/main/java/org/apache/spark/shuffle/sort/BypassMergeSortShuffleWriter.java
+++ b/core/src/main/java/org/apache/spark/shuffle/sort/BypassMergeSortShuffleWriter.java
@@ -137,8 +137,18 @@ public void write(Iterator<Product2<K, V>> records) throws IOException {
         blockManager.diskBlockManager().createTempShuffleBlock();
       final File file = tempShuffleBlockIdPlusFile._2();
       final BlockId blockId = tempShuffleBlockIdPlusFile._1();
+      // Note that we purposely do not call open() on the disk writers here; DiskBlockObjectWriter
+      // will automatically open() itself if necessary. This is an optimization to avoid file
+      // creation and truncation for empty partitions; this optimization probably doesn't make sense
+      // for most realistic production workloads, but it can make a large difference when playing
+      // around with Spark SQL queries in spark-shell on toy datasets: if you performed a query over
+      // an extremely small number of records then Spark SQL's default parallelism of 200 would
+      // result in slower out-of-the-box performance due to these constant-factor overheads. This
+      // optimization speeds up local microbenchmarking and SQL unit tests.
+      // However, we still create the file because the read code expects it to exist:
+      file.createNewFile();
       partitionWriters[i] =
-        blockManager.getDiskWriter(blockId, file, serInstance, fileBufferSize, writeMetrics).open();
+        blockManager.getDiskWriter(blockId, file, serInstance, fileBufferSize, writeMetrics);
     }
     // Creating the file to write to and creating a disk writer both involve interacting with
     // the disk, and can take a long time in aggregate when we open many files, so should be
diff --git a/core/src/main/scala/org/apache/spark/storage/DiskBlockObjectWriter.scala b/core/src/main/scala/org/apache/spark/storage/DiskBlockObjectWriter.scala
index e2dd80f243930..fc8c12ce7e99f 100644
--- a/core/src/main/scala/org/apache/spark/storage/DiskBlockObjectWriter.scala
+++ b/core/src/main/scala/org/apache/spark/storage/DiskBlockObjectWriter.scala
@@ -157,14 +157,16 @@ private[spark] class DiskBlockObjectWriter(
         objOut.flush()
         bs.flush()
         close()
-      }
 
-      val truncateStream = new FileOutputStream(file, true)
-      try {
-        truncateStream.getChannel.truncate(initialPosition)
+        val truncateStream = new FileOutputStream(file, true)
+        try {
+          truncateStream.getChannel.truncate(initialPosition)
+          file
+        } finally {
+          truncateStream.close()
+        }
+      } else {
         file
-      } finally {
-        truncateStream.close()
       }
     } catch {
       case e: Exception =>
diff --git a/sql/hive/compatibility/src/test/scala/org/apache/spark/sql/hive/execution/HiveCompatibilitySuite.scala b/sql/hive/compatibility/src/test/scala/org/apache/spark/sql/hive/execution/HiveCompatibilitySuite.scala
index 2d0d7b8af3581..71ac720e29b76 100644
--- a/sql/hive/compatibility/src/test/scala/org/apache/spark/sql/hive/execution/HiveCompatibilitySuite.scala
+++ b/sql/hive/compatibility/src/test/scala/org/apache/spark/sql/hive/execution/HiveCompatibilitySuite.scala
@@ -27,6 +27,8 @@ import org.apache.spark.sql.SQLConf
 import org.apache.spark.sql.hive.test.TestHive
 import org.apache.spark.tags.ExtendedHiveTest
 
+// Test comment to trigger Hive tests.
+
 /**
  * Runs the test cases that are included in the hive distribution.
  */